You stand around waiting for a new digital music chart and then three show up at once. In this case, all three are from Pandora and are designed to show what tracks are bubbling up and what tracks are getting played the most.
They are powered by Next Big Sound (which Pandora acquired in May 2015) and fall into three categories. First, Trendsetters covers the 20 emerging acts who have had the most stations added in the past week by users; Predictions makes the bold claim of being able to spot the acts “likely to hit the Billboard 200 chart for the first time within a given year”; finally, Top Spins lists the 100 most-played songs in the past week (which get anywhere between 1.5m and 10m plays in any week but are taken off after 16 weeks unless they are classed as being on a “hot streak”. This is all part of a wider push by Pandora to both raise its profile and present itself as a more artist-friendly service. Former Billboard writer Glenn Peoples has been regularly digging into play data and writing about it on Medium and these new charts will support that. That will no doubt up its profile but is not going to eradicate criticisms about its payment rates overnight.
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Tools: Kaiber
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